‘Behold, the Lamb of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
70th teaching
4.7.2014
Introduction to Christology
“Who is Jesus Christ?”
Here we are at the start of a new adventure!
We’ve passed down a long road through Systematic Theology,
beginning years ago with the Prolegomena (the introductory truths of theology),
then we followed that with Bibliology (a study of the Word of God, the Bible,
the Scriptures) and recently we just passed through Theology Proper, the core
of Theology, as it were: the study of God Himself, His essence, nature, being,
character, personality, emotions as summarized by His various attributes.
But as one famous writer put it: “The road goes ever on and
on.”
Tonight is the first step on a new quest. Tonight we embark
on a new journey, the journey of Christology. And as surely as in any quest, we
have a goal ahead of us: to answer the questions “Who is Jesus? What did He do?
And why does He matter?”
Our study tonight is entitled: “Introduction to
Christology: Who is Jesus Christ?”
As a first step in answering that question, let’s take a
glimpse into the life of Christ. How did the people who saw Him perceive Him?
What did they think about Him? Interestingly, we discover that all the
fascination and confusion surrounding Jesus Christ throughout the centuries
since His birth were mirrored in exactly the same way by the people of His
time. The Gospels portray Christ’s audience as wondering about His identity but
desperately wanting to hear His words and to see His miracles. Even his own
disciples once wondered: “What sort of Man is this, that even winds and waves
obey Him?”
Turn to Luke 9:1-20.
“Then [Jesus] called His twelve disciples together and
gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases. He sent
them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. And He said to them,
‘Take nothing for the journey, neither staffs nor bag nor bread nor money; and
do not have two tunics apiece. Whatever house you enter, stay there, and from
there depart. And whoever will not receive you, when you go out of that city,
shake off the very dust from your feet as a testimony against them.’ So they
departed and went through the towns, preaching the gospel and healing
everywhere.”
The church would later echo this kind of ministry that
Christ did in discipleship and raising up people who would do the ministry in
the next generation. So what we’re seeing here is a kind of practical test-run,
in a sense, for the original twelve disciples. They had been with Christ for
some time. They had heard His words, His sermons, His truth. They had seen His
miracles and healings. Now was their chance to put it all into practice.
Jesus gives them some instructions and sends them out, the
earliest Christian missionaries, to preach the kingdom of God. In my
experience, as I’m sure in some of yours, some incredible things are done on
missionary journeys. I’m certain that whatever the disciples experienced, they
came back changed, having seen things that were all the more real to them now
that they were involved in the work themselves.
But what follows isn’t an account of what happened on their
journeys. You’d think that’s what would come next, reading about the
newly-dubbed apostles casting out demons and healing the sick and guiding the
lost to the light. Instead, what comes next is a jump in the story to Herod the
tetrarch. So we go from the disciples of Christ suddenly to their worldly
ruler.
Why? Well, consider what’s on Herod’s mind.
v.7, “Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was
done by [Jesus]; and he was
perplexed, because it was said by some that John had risen from the dead, and
by some that Elijah had appeared, and by others that one of the old prophets
had risen again. Herod said, ‘John I have beheaded, but who is this of whom I
hear such things?’ So he sought to see Him.”
Who knows how influential and impactful the twelve apostles
were on their mission-trips at this time? Maybe Herod was hearing news even of
what the disciples of this man Jesus were doing. But it is clear that at the
least Herod had heard about what their Teacher was doing. And it wasn’t your
everyday run-of-the-mill sort of thing.
Herod, being in a position of authority, no doubt had seen
his fair share of magicians and charlatans. But something was unique enough
about the ministry of Jesus Christ that even Herod wondered: “Who is this?” and
sought to see Him.
But notice what follows is the story of the feeding of the
five-thousand, and what strikes me is that we’re just told that Herod wanted to
see Jesus, but we don’t read of Herod appearing with the multitudes of people
that actually sought Jesus out. I
mean, if he was there in the wilderness, somebody would have recognized him,
and no ruler would have gone out without all the pomp and entourage due his
name. I think if Herod had been with the five-thousand, we’d know about it.
So it’s ironic, then, that though we read that though Herod
desired to seek out Christ, he didn’t seek to be fed by Him. It seems Herod’s
was just a kind of superficial fascination with the miracle, with the power,
with the fame and the mystery surrounding this Man, Jesus Christ. Herod wanted
to see Him, sure, but only as a man desires to see a movie or a play, not as a
man who is starving to death seeks for food. The first has to do with amusement
and mere interest, the latter has to do with desperation and need. Herod wanted
to see Jesus, but not enough to humble himself, go out into a desert and listen
to Him.
Right from the get go, there’s a kind of division here.
There are many Herods today, people seeking out church, Christianity, religion,
finding God all for the vibe of it, the feel of it. There’s a kind of
fascination that many have for Jesus, but that’s all it is. It doesn’t go
anywhere. It doesn’t lead to actually knowing Him and to sitting at His feet in
worship, in need and in learning from Him. The Herods today only desire to see Jesus
in a superficial sense. Don’t let that be you. The disciples knew Christ. Herod
only knew about Christ.
But we must make this distinction at the outset of
Christology. There is all the difference in the world between knowing Jesus and knowing about Jesus. There’s a tremendous chasm between fascination
and desperation, between getting facts and getting fed, between knowing about
someone and actually getting to know that same someone.
By illustration, I think about my own wife. Think of the
difference between knowing and knowing about.
Shortly after I met Blythe, I knew about her. I knew a few facts about her.
Let’s say that, given my interest, I accumulated more facts about her. Let’s
say I secured her phone number through a friend of hers, that I found out her
address through another friend, and her apartment number, and what kind of food
she liked from her mom, what kind of tv shows she liked from her dad, and so
on.
At the end of a tremendous undertaking, I would have a huge
cache of facts about Blythe, but I would be in danger of actually never getting
to know her at all, because she’d probably think I was a creep for amassing all
these facts about her without ever going to her directly to get to know her
literally from herself.
Let’s not be Christian stalkers, people. Let’s not be like
Herod, sort of tantalized by the whole idea of God but never actually coming to
know Him. That’s just playing Christianity!
Our aim, ladies and gentlemen, is to study Christology in
such a way as to know the “Christ”, not just the “–ology”. We need facts, yes,
but we need to come to know the Person involved so much more, hand in hand with
the facts.
v.10, “And the apostles, when they had returned,
told Him all that they had done. Then He took them and went aside privately
into a deserted place belonging to the city called Bethsaida. But when the
multitudes knew it, they followed Him; and He received them and spoke to them
about the kingdom of God, and healed those who had need of healing. When the
day began to wear away, the twelve came and said to Him, ‘Send the multitude
away, that they may go into the surrounding towns and country, and lodge and
get provisions; for we are in a deserted place here.’ But He said to them, ‘You
give them something to eat.’”
Don’t miss how bizarre that statement is, perfectly simple
but from all human understanding impossible. And I can imagine that Jesus might
have said it in almost a nonchalant sort of way, as in “It’s no big deal, give
them something to eat, after all… didn’t you just go on a trip where you cured
diseases and exorcised people?”
v.13, “And they said, ‘We have no more than five
loaves and two fish, unless we go and buy food for all these people.’ For there
were about five thousand men. Then He said to His disciples, ‘Make them sit
down in groups of fifty.’ And they did so, and made them all sit down. Then He
took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and
broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the multitude. So they
all ate and were filled, and twelve baskets of the leftover fragments were
taken up by them.
“And it
happened, as He was alone praying, that His disciples joined Him, and He asked
them, saying, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’ So they answered and said, ‘John
the Baptist, but some say Elijah; and others say that one of the old prophets
has risen again.”
In the same vein as Herod, the disciples repeat what the
world was saying about Jesus, that He was John the Baptist or Elijah, good men,
men of God, prophets. But note Jesus’ divine ability to strike right through
all the useless talk and get right to the heart of the issue at hand…
v.20, “He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I
am?’”
There is the heart of Christology. And make no mistake, how
you answer this question will decide how you spend eternity, in bliss or in
pain, in joy or sorrow, in heaven or hell. This is a question, as it were, put
to every human being on earth: Who is Jesus Christ to you?
Savior? Redeemer? Friend? A good man? A liar? A lunatic? A
legend? Or Lord of all?
This question divides the world.
This is one part in the gospels where Peter got it right.
He answered and said “The Christ of God.”
Put the A+ on his report card because he passed the test. Elsewhere in Matthew 16:16, we read that Peter’s
answer also included the words: “You are
the Christ, the Son of the living God.” To which Jesus responded: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh
and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
So though there was great confusion in Jesus’ time
surrounding His identity, with the same confusion still existing in our time,
those who walked and talked with Christ knew and realized who He really was.
They went beyond just being fascinated by Him and came to trust in Him. They
were fed and taught by Him. They transcended merely knowing about Him and hearing about Him to
actually knowing Him and actually hearing what He had to say.
Now given that we’re doing an introduction to Christology
tonight, we have before us several questions to answer:
1. What is Christology?
2. Why study Christology?
3. To whom shall you go?
1.
What is Christology?
As a field of study, Theology runs the risk of turning
people off with its terminology, with words that can sometimes be cumbersome
and inelegant to the modern tongue. It needn’t be so. Medical science, physical
science, biological science each have their terminology. If we’re to think of
theology as a kind of science, then we must expect that it will use terms which
are there because there are no simple words to explain some extremely complex
ideas.
The key is to remember that these words have meaning and
that we use them for a good reason. So when we come to the term Christology, we
realize that this is a useful word and it is used with good reason.
What does it mean? Christology means the study of Christ,
from the Greek words Christos and logia. It is the section within Theology
that is concerned with the nature and person of Jesus Christ, the “second
member” of the Holy Trinity. Considerations involved in Christology include a
study of Jesus’ ministry, His death and resurrection, His acts and miracles, His
sermons and teachings, and His role in salvation.
Christology, then, touches upon various other sections
within Theology, such as Theology Proper, since Christ is said to be One with
God and we understand who and what God is through Theology Proper; Christology
also touches on Hamartiology, the study of sin, since Jesus Christ knew no sin
but became sin for us; also Soteriology, the study of salvation, since that is
what Jesus Christ secured for us on the cross; Christ is primarily known
through the Bible, which is understood through Bibliology; Christ is the head
of the church, which we understand in Ecclesiology; Christ sent the Helper, the
Holy Spirit, who is detailed under Pneumatology; Christ became Man and what man
exactly is can be understood through Anthropology; a consideration of Christ’s
future reign is included in Eschatology, the section dealing with future
things.
So Christology forms a kind of network, a thread through
the major sections of theology. We’re reminded that the figure of Christ is the
central figure not only of the Bible but really of all Christian Theology.
To borrow the phrasing of C.S. Lewis, we might think of
Christology as the “science of Christ”. I like that.
It reminds us not
that Christ can be tested and put in a laboratory and subjected to the
scientific method in exactly the same way that you might test whether a
substance is volatile or reactive or whether this and that will mix together.
Christ obviously occupies a part of reality distinct and separate from the
natural world and so natural methods don’t necessarily
apply.
Rather, to think of Christology as the science of Christ
reminds us that there are real things to be known about Jesus Christ. The
tendency with religious matters is almost to encourage and engender confusion,
it seems. Just because something is supernatural, some churches think it’s just
fine to let their congregations think about the supernatural in any way they
want. And so you end up with pews full of holy-barkers, or people rolling
around of the floor in holy-seizures, or in the case of Christ, imagining just
anything they want about His reality.
Not so.
In the natural sciences, there are real facts. The Earth
being a globe is a scientific fact. Gravity giving weight to physical objects and
causing them to fall is a scientific fact. Heated water turning to gaseous steam
is a scientific fact. These are constants. We understand how the world works
because there are laws which prescribe that it naturally always works in the
same way.
Similarly, there are constants about Christ. He will always
be God. It will always be true that He was born of a virgin. His whole life was
characterized by sinless-ness. All of this isn’t to say that there is no
mystery about Jesus or God.
There’s plenty of mystery. For all of these facts must be
discovered. Just as in natural sciences, facts are discovered not invented. Facts
were uncovered and unearthed, they were realized. No human invented the idea of
the world being round, it was simply what scientists discovered to be true
about reality. Anyone who believes the world is flat today would be considered
outdated, misinformed, flat-out (ha!) wrong!
And in exactly
the same way, exactly the same way,
Christology exists as a kind of science. There are real facts to be known about
Christ. There is real knowledge, real truth and thus real errors to avoid and
real false-statements to be put down. There are people, many of them, who are
confused, misinformed and simply flat-out wrong about Jesus Christ. How bizarre
is it that many modern believers are living with a kind of theology of the
middle-ages, full of superstitions and mysticism. It need not be so. There’s no
need to wander around in the dark.
It can be hard work, but there are real things to discover
about Jesus. Theology is a true field of study, and Christology is a true
science, albeit with different methods of reaching discovery. What those
methods are will become apparent through the course of our study and we’ll
touch on the development of Christology briefly tonight.
So what is Christology? The science of Christ. A field of
study with real facts and real discoveries, Christology is concerned with the
person, nature and life of Jesus Christ.
2.
Why study Christology?
I mean, why bother? There are so many other things that can
require our attention and so many concerns in life. What does it matter that a
1st century Jew was crucified by Romans? What does it matter that
Jesus did some miracles and said a few things? Why care? If He already died for
your sins, what more is there to be done about it?
And more than that, why not just be content with a basic
knowledge of Jesus? Why not be satisfied with a rudimentary idea of Him? Or why
not just let people think about Him as much as they want to and in any way they
want to? Why do all the hard work of Christological study?
As we mentioned in our past studies in God’s attributes,
there is really no greater thing to know than to know God. As Paul the apostle
said: “I count all things as loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ
Jesus my Lord...”
The last attribute of God we considered was His Importance,
and if through all the course of studying His attributes we’ve learned one
thing it is that God matters, that He is significant and more important than
anything else in life.
Guys, Theology and Christology can be hard work. But it’s
worth it.
Why study Christology? That’s like asking why choose the
best in life? You choose it because it is the best. And simply, Christology, as
a part of theology, is the greatest and highest field of study in existence.
Aside from its importance, I can think of another great
reason to study Christology.
As I mentioned earlier, the confusion about Christ’s nature
and identity that was prevalent when Christ walked the earth has not
disappeared over time. The world clearly doesn’t seem to know what to do with
the real Jesus Christ. In many cases of modern religions and cults, we find
that the same exact confusions of the
early centuries are still around long into the 21st century.
Let me give you an example.
One of the early heretics in the Christian church was a man
named Arius who is remembered for the part he played in igniting the Arian
controversy, a fourth-century theological battle. The teaching of Arius spread
like wildfire through the early church.
In the year 321AD, Alexander the bishop of Alexandria
booted Arius and excluded him from fellowship in the church. A few years later,
the Christian Emperor Constantine called for an unheard of solution: a council
to be held which would put an end to the Arian dispute and resolve the
controversy. This came to be known as the First Council of Nicaea and it lasted
for somewhere around two months.
The council ended with Arius and two of his unyielding
associates banished into exile. The council produced the Nicene creed, a
profession of faith that was then distributed out to the churches to guard
against further theological error.
So just what was Arius’ theological error? What was the
Arian controversy all about?
Here’s some of Arius’ own words: “If the Father begat the
Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is
evident, that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily
follows, that he [the Son] had his substance from nothing.”
Basically, the Arian heresy taught that Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, was a created Being, the first created Being, but a production of
God the Father nonetheless. Arius taught that the very first thing that God
ever did, before all time, was make the
Son, the Word, the Logos. This meant that Arius also denied the biblical
teaching of the Trinity, since he considered Jesus to be a separate Being from
the Father, a created Being.
And where could we possibly find that idea today?
The Arian heresy is alive and well, though Arius himself is
long gone since his exile, in the form of an American cult called the Jehovah’s
Witnesses. They believe, like Arius did, that Jesus Christ was created by God
the Father and that the Trinity doctrine is false. It is the same idea, the
same lie that the early church had already rejected seventeen-hundred years
ago, the same false teaching that cannot be found in Scripture, not in 321AD,
not in 2014AD. The confusions of today are just the heresies which the early
church battled wrapped up in new paper.
As Cobb said at the beginning of Inception, “What is the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus?
An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has
taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.”
So why study Christology? Well not only because it is the
best of all sciences, but also because biblical Christology is the cure for
confusion, the cure for bad theology, bad ideas and wrong, old, outdated
heresies that have long expired. Every false system of belief, every cult and
every other religion can come so very close to Christianity and yet miss this
one point on the nature and person of Christ and so miss everything, whether
it’s Islam, which says Christ is just a prophet, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, who
say Christ is not co-eternal with the Father, or Judaism, which says Christ is
not God and not mediator between God and man.
Biblically sound Christology is the best guard against
heresy and cults, because Christology is always the point of deviation. You can
test the correctness of any teacher on the basis of what they have to say about
Jesus and how their words match up against the Bible’s words, how their
description of Christ matches up with the biblical description of Christ.
3.
To whom shall you go?
Turn finally to John
6, where we read of another exchange between Jesus and His disciples.
Christ, as you know if you’ve read the gospels, said both some profound things
and some very hard things. At one point He said “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life…” That’s
a pretty uncanny statement to make.
And apparently, many of His disciples were offended by such
a statement and left Him. They stopped following after Him.
John 6:67-68
says “Then Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Do
you also want to go away?’ But Simon Peter answered Him, ‘Lord, to whom shall
we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
The quality of your relationship with Jesus is found in
asking yourself this question: where else could you go?
What kind of a hold does the world have on you? A greater
hold than the grip of God upon your life? What else elbows its way into your
affections, your attentions and your desires, which struggles to push its way
in and push Jesus out, out of your thoughts, your feelings, your devotion, your
time, your energy, your service?
Don’t be mistaken. Leave Christ and you leave everything.
And even should you reach the end of your life with some shred of happiness,
with some semblance of comfort, not having succumbed to the wasting powers of
your own sin, the corruption of your heart and mind, the alienation of friends,
family and Redeemer, silently suffering the unending torment of the
restlessness within you, and you somehow arrive un-battered and un-bruised to
the end, you will still lose it all,
even your own soul, without Christ. There is nowhere to go outside of Jesus.
Don’t let anything cheat you into thinking otherwise.
There is no problem you can ever face that does not have as
a part of or as its ultimate solution the God-Man, Jesus Christ. There is no
addiction, no fear, no depression, no loneliness, no want or need, no
desperation, no anger or frustration that Jesus cannot cure, cannot satisfy,
cannot ultimately remedy.
Guys, we need to
do this. We must study Christology.
We must free ourselves from the bad theology, from the agony of the soul and
from the waywardness of a wandering Christianity by studying and knowing Christ
more fully. He is the cure of lame Christianity.
It cannot be said more completely than the way Saint
Patrick put it: “Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ
within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me”.
So then, with all the scope of Christology ahead of us, it
is my earnest hope that Jesus Christ would become to you all the more valuable,
all the nearer to you, and all the more real, that He would become more than
just a religious icon, more than just a historical figure, but a tender
Shepherd, your Guide, your truest Friend, the Lover of your soul.
May our study through Christology, though it will involve
the academic and engage the intellect, involve far more and far deeper a
concern than just that. Again, the temptation is there to simply know more about Christ and to never really come to
know the Lamb of God Himself. For all the value of Christology, it is worthless
if we fail to meet the real Son of the living God.
I leave you, then, with the inspiring words of D.L. Moody,
who said: “A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a
personal friend. His is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we
have.”
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